


until the light seeps in above your face, let's run away with me

by yourendlessblue



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Death, Past Jeanpiku, and so does mikasa i LOVE her she deserves everything, jean kirschtein is my best boy and he deserves the world and i will give it to him, past eremika, so i keep jumping ships and then i make myself sad again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29310669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourendlessblue/pseuds/yourendlessblue
Summary: Now are we going? Shall we try running too?(Jean & Mikasa talk by the setting sun and a silent grave.)*Warning: might contain/allude to spoilers from Chapter 137.
Relationships: Mikasa Ackerman/Eren Yeager, Mikasa Ackerman/Jean Kirstein, Pieck Finger/Jean Kirstein
Comments: 15
Kudos: 75





	until the light seeps in above your face, let's run away with me

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate title: Jean and Mikasa bond over dead lovers and wonder about what-could-have-beens, and might try for what-could-be. 
> 
> *Warning (again!): might contain/allude to spoilers from Chapter 137. Also, speculated endings and headcanons, I guess?

+

He is alone in unfamiliar land, again.

Jean wonders if he’ll really ever reach the point he desires most in life—the steady calm, the quiet noise of a wonderfully normal living, a warm body to cling onto at nights and a small weight to carry and play with at days; or maybe several. Ideally three, he used to think, so should anything happen with one, the two will still have each other. Such was the horrid line of thoughts he was too-accustomed to thinking, even in a make-believe ideal world that only exists inside his head. It’s an occupational hazard.

The hill is quiet and the late summer breeze kind, carrying a comfortable warmth while bringing the promise of cooler times. He looks down at the plains below—once they would have been filled with industrial zones, steel, copper, wood, food and everything inbetween. Now there’s mostly plains and struggling farms, rebuilt from the flattened rubble from the rumbling. This is someone’s hometown, once upon a time. Pieck's. He himself hasn’t been to Trost in a long time. It must be as familiar as this place, now, which is not at all. Jean puffs a smoke from his cigarette—a filthy habit he’d picked up and failed to put down—as he contemplates whether it all made sense.

The mainland Eldians had time and time again pulled the short end of the stick. They’d lived a life of persecution, hated, killed, used; they were the ones most deserving of freedom from being trapped between the outside world and their bloodline. And yet, their fate was such that Liberio was the first to be trampled upon. If he, a devil from inside the walls, had been angry after knowing they were trapped within, he wonders what mainland Eldians had thought—knowing perfectly well how trapped they were. At least life inside the wall had been filled with blissful ignorance. If he was one of the mainland Eldian who had survived, he’d have hated the whole world and re-started the vicious cycle all over again.

Not that he’d know what it would be like anyways—not that he’d know what stood in place instead of the yellowing farmlands he’s now absently staring at. Pieck did know, though, what it was like, and to him she’d always recall the memory fondly. A memory of a trapped life, but a fond one nonetheless—he supposes you can’t really see clearly through the rose-coloured fogs of memory.

Jean exhales one last time, letting the smoke of his cigar be carried away by the winds. He shouldn’t stay here for too long—he’s needed somewhere; almost always. It’s a tiring job, politics and diplomacy—and they need to do a lot of it. It’s the consequences of their wish for peace. Sometimes he misses going out to the field with his gear; misses the stupid ritual of kissing his blade or the handle of his gun. Funny, he was so desperate to stop fighting back then.

“I need to go,” he says to her headstone, “Armin’s going to be pissed if I miss the meeting with the old farts of Hizuru. It’s not really him being pissed I’m worried about. It’s him ratting off to Annie _and_ Annie getting pissed at me that’s the problem here.”

Silence. Jean throws his cigarette to the ground and stomps on it to extinguish the light. There are a couple withered cigarettes, all the same sort, on that particular spot near her grave. “Sorry,” he says, grinning in her direction. “This is partially your fault too, okay, you always let me and never nag me to quit, you’re way too used to Eren’s monkey brother’s smoking that you didn’t mind me doing the same.”

He can’t really remember when he started smoking—just that it happened, and Pieck never minded. In a way, it’s like how they started—it just happened like that, without him realising; the war ended and suddenly she slipped into his life to carve a mold that fit only her and her alone. One that’s empty now that she’s gone.

Pieck told him smoking gave him an air of maturity, of command, like Zeke. He looked good doing so, she’d said. Jean snorts. Seems like he never really could escape the shadow of the two doomed brothers no matter whoever it is his heart set its sight on. Bastards, both of them.

“Anyways, your dad says hi,” he says, putting his now-free hand in his pocket and throwing the military jacket he’s been holding over his shoulder. “His breathing problem’s acting up again so he can’t climb up here. He’s been saying to me he’s getting closer to meet you again but I don’t think so, Pieck. He’s built pretty tough, your old man. I think he’ll even outlive me.” He made the routine trip to the Fingers’ home, today, just a couple hundred of metres by the foothill, to tell her father he’s visiting her grave.

Jean lowers himself to squat by her headstone and kisses the curved top—it’s warm and rough, unlike his memory of Pieck’s skin; she was always cool and smooth to the touch, allowing him to slow down and savour every second. And there were a limited amount of seconds.

“I’m off, Pieck,” he says, his thumb gently caressing the headstone before he stands. Jean chuckles humourlessly. “Whatever am I going to do if Armin’s gone? You and Armin are the calmest, most level-headed people in our raggedy team. If this diplomacy bullshit falls to my hands, we’re gonna have to go to war once more, I’m afraid.”

“I’m afraid that’s not true.”

Jean reflexively turns to the direction of the voice with alarm, hand flying to his gun strapped around his waist—they had to, now that they’re in foreign lands; after all, there’s no telling who still harbours hate and who doesn’t anymore. But it’s someone he wouldn’t dream of to point a gun at, to hold a blade to throat.

Mikasa stands meters from him, the very picture of his lost past in her white knee-length dress and long, dark hair.

“Mikasa,” he exclaims, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” she simply says. Jean raises an eyebrow.

“Did Armin make you? I’m not going to be late, it’s not sunset yet.”

Mikasa shakes her head and moves forward—cautious, but graceful. Jean has grown familiar to the way she carries herself, from years and years of training, working, fighting as friends and comrades, and years of pining, too. He realises she’s bringing a small bouquet of purple flowers, unwrapped, but tied tidily with a thin ribbon. “If I may…” she trails off, unsurely looking between him and Pieck’s grave.

“Go ahead.”

Mikasa puts the flowers down by the headstone. It’s an absurd situation, he thinks incredulously—he littered cigarettes near his dead lover’s grave and his one-sided past love brought flowers. Jean’s used to incredulity. It’s the very core of living.

He can’t help but observe her, though. Mikasa’s still very pretty—falling in love with Pieck hadn’t made him change his mind. She’s grown her hair out again, like when they were kids, and it softly flies with the direction of the wind. “What gives?” He asks, curious. A faint shade of pink stains Mikasa’s cheeks; and she ducks her head, as if hiding in a scarf. She’s not wearing her scarf, he realises. He can’t remember the last time she does.

“I never had a grave to put flowers on,” she says quietly. Jean nods, not caring if Mikasa’s seeing. He understands. “But I suppose so does hundreds and thousands of people.”

That’s true, he realises. Of the endless amount of the dead they knew, far too few of them has a gravestone—only Sasha, and Connie’s mother, a gravestone filled with nothing that stands where his old home was, after they’d relieved her of her misery. Even he doesn’t know where Marco is, lost amongst hundreds buried in a mass cemetery, unnamed, only marked as _soldier_. Pieck was the first amongst the titan shifters who had met her fated end of time.

“I’m sorry,” Jean says, meaning it. At the very least, he has this—this place of rest to come to, to pretend he’s talking to Pieck again. There’s nothing left of Eren Mikasa could tangibly hold on to. “I wish we could’ve buried him, I’d like to yell a thing or two to his headstone.”

Mikasa looks at him with a smile that is thin, but genuine. “I would ban you from visiting,” she tells him. Jean snorts.

“Really?”

“No,” she says, smile growing wistful, “that’s what graves are for, aren’t they. For the living to say unsaid words, to yell unsaid grievances, the sort.”

“Mm,” there’s little he hasn’t said to Pieck. He’d uttered love, adoration, hope. He’d told her his simple, foolish dreams for her to kindly say they weren’t foolish at all, they were human. He’d told her his regrets for things he did, the ghosts of people he killed, titan or otherwise. He’d apologised, for obliterating her Panzer unit. The moment he knew he wanted her Jean knew he had finite time. So he made the most of it. So did she.

But life goes on, and though he had said everything he could have said to the woman he loved, every day Jean finds something new he wants to tell her; and such is the reason he climbs this hill over and over again. He starts to itch for another cigarette. “What was it like for you, after the rumbling?”

“Hard,” she says after a while. “I felt very alone. Moreover when I realised everyone—Armin, especially, will also—yes.”

Jean knows what both feels like. Maybe Mikasa’s pain extends past the years before they even met, maybe she’s been through more than he has, but eventually in the world they live in one would know what it’s like to lose. He knows it since he lost Marco, since he lost Sasha—Eren and Reiner and Floch—and countless others that he and Mikasa both lost. And with Pieck he knows what it’s like to love someone, in whatever form, and know that there’s a deadline set on their age. Pieck had outlived her predicted lifespan of thirteen years after becoming the cart titan by one; she said it might have been due to the titan’s endurance. It was a year he spent being on edge, a year he spent in unending dread.

Armin’s got three years left, now. Annie two, with the time frozen for her. If he lets himself be bitter he would say, how lucky of the two of them to know they don’t have to live too long without one. Regular people like him—and the relative of some cursed baby somewhere, will have to face the brunt of living with the ghost of them after the time comes.

Living, truly is a curse.

An unbidden guilt rises, then. He _did_ loved Mikasa, however immature his love had been, and at the very least they’d been friends. Yet, in the wake of Eren’s death—her last living family of sorts, someone she loved so dearly and held so close to her heart, someone who had shaped almost her entire self as she grew up—she was alone. He left her alone. Strange how life works. He once even entertained a thought of Mikasa filling a set place in his future.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. The impropriety of saying it in front of Pieck’s grave isn’t lost on him, but still he feels sorry. The world has been unkind to them all, but most of all, perhaps Mikasa. He remembers the words that would run around his mind, back then, when there’d been nothing he could do but watch her wither underneath the pressure of Eren slipping away.

 _She deserves better_.

She still does.

Mikasa tilts her head to watch him questioningly. “What for?”

“The world,” he vaguely says. Truly, if there’s anyone the world should apologise to, it’s her. He’s part of the world. He owes it, too, he thinks.

But Mikasa shakes her head. “You’re not responsible for the world, Jean.”

“I guess not,” he says, betraying his line of thought, “but the world is cruel.” _To me. To you. To us._

To everyone.

The sun has long set, and cold night air falls upon them. A gust of wind flies past them, sending a cool breeze to his nape and his face. It blows Mikasa’s hair away from hers as she turns to face him, and Jean almost staggers backwards as the sight transports him back to when he was twelve and her face was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Mikasa, the tough and brave Mikasa, offers him a kind and gentle smile, one she has rarely, if ever, offers to him—or anyone aside from Eren. It almost mirrors the inherent gentleness he loved in Pieck. “It is,” she says, and Jean realises they’re both at a place where the same serenity and acceptance of how the world is, how life is, how _it_ is, are what they so desperately need. Are what they’re looking for. Perhaps Mikasa is halfway there, and he needs to catch up, but maybe, maybe they can go there together, one day. “But it’s also beautiful.”

He thinks he might be crazy, but as they walk away and he smiles at Pieck one last time, her dark gravestone gleams under the moon, the way Mikasa’s black hair reflects light.

+

**Author's Note:**

> LOOK YOU CANT EXPECT ME TO READ 137 AND NOT SHIP JEANPIKU THEY'RE CUTEEEEE 
> 
> so um yeah i was supposed to update my royai/fma fics but i got writer's block (plus, i only got my life back like a week ago after months of crazy surge of MISS RONA) and i've been binge-ing aot both the anime and the manga these past 2 weeks and damn i love it.  
> used to be on (wait, i'm still on) SS JEANKASA because cute as hell, all the while never minded eremika as well because it is how it is, and just... the whole pining-unrequited-yadda yadda is fun yanno? and then 137 happened and i was like 'hol up if mikasa cant move tf on from titan boy (eren im sorry honey i love you but man ur getting on my nerves these days) jean deserves someone who can love him and jeanpiku cute' but then i thought 'wait...... her days are numbered what the FUCK NOBODY EVER WINS IN THIS MANGA' and so that's how this word vomit came to be. i hope you enjoy??? stay healthy!!! <33
> 
> btw sorry if there's any theory inaccuracy because im dumb and aot theories are Very Hard
> 
> if youre also a reader of fma and read my fma fics and waiting for an update.... close your eyes baby close your eyes. this is not me. i dont exist. im a figment of ur imagination and all my writings are too. (jk jk i'm working on it i swear!!)


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